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    Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History
    Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History
    Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History
    Audiobook13 hours

    Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History

    Written by Paul Schneider

    Narrated by Alan Sklar

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    In Old Man River, Paul Schneider tells the story of the river at the center of America's rich history-the Mississippi. Some fifteen thousand years ago, the majestic river provided Paleolithic humans with the routes by which early man began to explore the continent's interior. Since then, the river has been the site of historical significance, from the arrival of Spanish and French explorers in the 16th century to the Civil War. George Washington fought his first battle near the river, and Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman both came to President Lincoln's attention after their spectacular victories on the lower Mississippi.

    In the 19th century, home-grown folk heroes such as Daniel Boone and the half-alligator, half-horse, Mike Fink, were creatures of the river. Mark Twain and Herman Melville led their characters down its stream in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Confidence-Man. A conduit of real-life American prowess, the Mississippi is also a river of stories and myth.

    Schneider traces the history of the Mississippi from its origins in the deep geologic past to the present. Though the busiest waterway on the planet today, the Mississippi remains a paradox-a devastated product of American ingenuity, and a magnificent natural wonder.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 14, 2013
    ISBN9781452687032
    Author

    Paul Schneider

    Paul Schneider is the acclaimed author of Bonnie and Clyde, Brutal Journey, The Enduring Shore, and The Adirondacks, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. He and his family live in West Tisbury, Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for Old Man River

    3/5

    26 ratings11 reviews

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    • 3/5
      An easy read but the history was rather shallow. To do the massive subject justice the book would need to be thousands of pages long. Try to review the history of the Mississippi watershed from early pre-historic times until today just could not be covered well in such a short work.What was there was interesting but I would have liked much more detail & depth. Very few pages or time was spent on modern history and the history/impact of floods over time.
    • 4/5
      A thoroughly entertaining read spanning prehistory through present day about a lifeline through the heart of the U.S. Having traveled along the Mississippi River so many times, I was quite familiar with a number of towns and sites mentioned in the book as well as the general history. However, there was so much more that Schneider brings to light that makes me want to explore the length of this great river all the more. Also, the book is written in a relaxed and engaging manner. If you're looking for an interesting and comprehensive read in preparation for your Mississippi River exploration, I recommend this book to you.
    • 4/5
      A big sprawling book as wide as the Mississippi drainage in its scope, and as meandering as the lower course of the river. Beginning five hundred million years ago, Schneider briefly traces the history of the land through drifting and rifting continents, seaways, and mountain ranges to the formation of the proto-Mississippi sixty five million years ago. He then leaps forward to 1841 and the discovery of dinosaur fossils in Missouri. Then it's back and forth through Folsom points and glaciations, early civilizations and the author's own wanderings, Spanish and French exploration, and (eventually) the Civil War. The short chapters keep the narrative moving, and if there is more coverage of the east half of the drainage and its relatively recent human history than I would have liked, as opposed to the westward expansion - well, I suppose an author can't please everyone. I did eventually read the whole book and mostly enjoyed it, but for me it's not a keeper. YMMV.
    • 4/5
      Author Paul Schneider has characterized this book as more a biography that a history. 'Old Man River' tells the stories of the Mississippi River - - its tributaries and drainages. Tracing the history from its prehistoric, ice age, Paleolithic roots, Schneider touches on geologic history, archaeological evidence, and anthropological findings to weave together the tales and legends of this river system. The river has been the scene of historical events with ancient cultures followed by the arrival of European explorers and American settlers. Schneider's book continues to present day examination of this busiest waterway of the planet - - a natural wonder that has been shaped and reshaped. It's modern history is American history. (lj)
    • 3/5
      Paul Schneider’s Old Man River is a book that defies easy categorization. It touches on history, geography, geology, archaeology, and flood-control engineering—with elements of travel narrative and popular natural history thrown in—but is not, strictly speaking, about any of those things. The geographic scope of the book is equally broad: not just the river itself, but its tributaries and drainage basin, which encompasses nearly half of North America. Old Man River, like Walt Whitman, contains multitudes.How well all this works for you will depend, to a great extent, on what you want out of the book. Old Man River is neither a conventional, steadily paced narrative history, like John Barry’s Rising Tide, nor a sharply delineated but well-rounded study of a place, like John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens. It is a loosely organized collection of self-contained, stand-alone pieces—some chapter-length, others little more than vignettes—that suggests a more accurate subtitle might have been: “Things about the history of the Mississippi Basin that interested me.” Antebellum river pirates thus get attention out of all proportion to their historical significance, while the drier subject of the Mississippi’s role in industrialization and the rise of the “rust belt” goes begging. The discovery of the famous Folsom and Clovis (NM) archaeological sites in the 1920s lose most of their historical context, and are related instead to Schneider’s own discoveries of Native American artifacts.None of this makes Old Man River a bad book, or even an unsuccessful one. Schneider writes beautifully, and readers whose interests match his will likely be enthralled. It is, however, a book more likely to please fans of literary nonfiction than those seeking a serious, detailed study of the Mississippi and its impact on the humans around it.
    • 2/5
      This book was a big disappointment. It reads as a number of travel pieces mashed up with an attempt to synthesize the history of the entire Mississippi River Basin since prehistoric times.It's not good history. There's no original historical research that I saw, and the author clearly is not a trained historian. Even with popular history I expect a certain basic competence, and it's just not here.The travel pieces aren't great either, unfortunately.It was a great concept, and I was thrilled to come across this book at the library. Reading it, though, turned into a sad slog. I can't recommend this, which is a shame.
    • 3/5
      As noted by several other reviewers, if you have nothing else to do, and are looking for an "entertaining and readable" book about the Mississippi River… this is the book for you. Personally, I had difficulty understanding why the book was written. It seems to be the justification for traveling various parts of the vast river system. As a 200 page travelogue it would have been much more readable. As a 200 history of the river it would have been a useful read. The attempted combination really didn't do much for me, however.
    • 4/5
      This is an entertaining and readable look at the history of the Mississippi River. Although well-researched and accompanied by extensive notes and bibliography, it comes across more as a collection of anecdotes and tidbits than a serious academic or comprehensive history. The lengthy sections on prehistoric and then pre-Columbian history were particularly interesting, especially when highlighting the few remaining visible signs of the people who lived nearby long ago. By contrast, in more modern times, Lewis and Clark are barely mentioned, and although there's a section on the Army Corps of Engineers, there's no serious analysis of what they have done and what their impact has been. Overall Old Man River was a good read, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in a river-based perspective on our nation's history.
    • 4/5
      A more apt, but ungainly sub-title for this book would The Mississippi River BASIN in North American History. The book does not deal only with what the general public thinks of as the Mississippi (the lower Mississippi) but all its tributaries. When we look at the whole basin, it’s most of the United States between the Rockies and the Appalachians, or about one third of the continental US. This makes for a wide canvas on which the historian, Paul Schneider, paints his story. In the opinion of this reader, having such a large area of focus is both good and bad, but more often good.The part of the book I found dull and somewhat unrelated were the chapters dealing with the Iroquois league and the Mingo tribe in New York and Pennsylvania. I felt that the internal politics of these tribes and their relations to the French and English colonists were not closely related to the Mississippi story. These tribes lived on the Alleghany, which is part of the basin, but to me it seemed a bit of stretch to get involved in this tangential story.There was also a brief chapter on the author’s finding and losing of Indian artifacts, that felt like a good stand-alone magazine article shoehorned into the book.Setting aside those criticisms, I enjoyed this book and learned quite a bit. The book begins with prehistoric animals, i.e. giant sloths, mammoths, etc. He slowly segues into the story of the first humans to inhabit the Mississippi basin. The more advanced groupings of these Indians constructed large and mysterious mounds throughout the country. Many of these mounds were gradually plowed under or lie underneath the parking lot of your local grocery story. However some have survived and been designated state parks. The author visits some of these sites and offers his first hand impressions of them. Some of the mounds are simply that, large piles of dirt in a conical shape, but others were formed in the shape of animals like snakes and bears.The story gradually flows into the European exploration of the river basin, beginning with Hernando de Soto and more notably carried out by the larger-than-life la Salle. After the exploration, the book deals with New France and the slow encroachment of the English colonists and the resulting wars for supremacy. About half-way through the book the Americans begin enter the scene and take over. I thought the second half was the most compelling portion of the book, particularly the chapter on riverboats. It’s startling to read how often the boilers on these boats exploded, sending burned passengers flying hundreds of yards into the river and woods. The riverboat engines were the first target of federal safety regulation, which for the most part stopped the explosions. An depressing exception is the Sultana tragedy. It is the worst maritime disaster in American history. 1,600 people died, most of the former Union prisoners from Andersonville trying to return home. Another particularly interesting chapter is “I Long to See You” which in part deals with river pirates. The Harper brothers make Charles Manson look like Mr. Rogers. The river was much wilder place in the early 1800s.The next to the last chapter discusses the troubling issue of what men have done to change the river. The Mississippi before the Corp of Engineers is to Peter Weller what the Mississippi is now to Robocop. Humans have altered the river and its tributaries with dams (about 50,000 on the entire watershed), canals, and levees. The effect of these changes have been most detrimental to the Louisiana. The levees and the canals channel the silt of the river deep into the Gulf of Mexico rather than spread out across marshes and tidal basins. The dams prevent from the silt from traveling in the first place. Without the silt, Louisiana salt marshes are being eaten away by the ocean. The coast loses an area the size of Manhattan every year. The loss of salt marshes on the coast reduce the diversity of the ecosystem. Tidal surges are slowed by marshes, so the smaller the marshes the worse tidal surges are during hurricanes. Furthermore, depriving the Mississippi of its silt impoverishes our farmland in the basin. Finally, using levees to prevent flooding has paradoxically made big floods worse by not allowing the river any outlet.I hope that this book receives a large audience because for the most part the book is an entertaining read and to quote the author, it’s hard to “imagine America without the Mississippi. The river’s history is our history.”
    • 4/5
      When I first saw the book for review, I thought it would be great to get a comprehensive history of the Mississippi River throughout the history of the continent (both Native American, and the later colonization and the role the river played.) The book is not quite that, but almost. Part historical narrative, and part personal travelogue, the book takes a journey through the geographic forces that built and rebuilt the Mississippi River system through the native american tribes that thrived in the area to the present. But I digress...I thought, as opposed to earlier reviewers, that the book presents a a fairly decent narrative of the history of the major tribes that populated the region. What might surprise many Americans is the rich culture of mound building that existed in America, much of which has been lost to development over time. I think any reader who is not a specialist on how the Spanish, British and French moved their way through the area, and their interaction with the native populations, will have much to learn. I did find it a bit distracting with the personal travelogue interspersed with the historical narrative, but could see my way through that. I found it very interesting to read up on the immediate pre-civil war era, and the lawlessness that prevailed on the river. I thought that perhaps the Civil War era chapter could have been meatier however. I was perplexed at the fast-forward (to an extent) from the civil war era to the modern era and the building of the levees, dams and other works that have shaped the river, leading to the BP oil disaster. I would have thought that perhaps a good discussion of the role the river played in the US industrial era (perhaps how it was utilized to support WWI, WWII, etc) might have been helpful. However, despite some of my concerns, I found the book a good, light read. A good summer read, and might be of interest to anyone who might be thinking about embarking on a similar journey as the author.
    • 1/5
      Doing what I call "Tidbitting through history," this is a rather disjointed travel book of various forms of data connected somewhat to different parts of the Mississippi River. Tales range from Civil War chapters to stories of the early colonization of the region, and are familiar to anyone who has had a traveling companion who is a bore and a know-it-all who has to demonstrate their significant knowledge and wise observatons at each point. The author, who is a proud New Englander and who is fond of reproducing the dialect of the rubes he encounters, who are full of pithy words such as "Heck" and hearty laughter as in: "Ha. Ha. Ha", not to mention the odd local people who sing, "Me gotta go, me oh my oh!". In many of his comments about the river valley's history and geography, he does not let the truth interfer with his higher-sophisticated opinions and his urban outlook. Most of his work is on the northern part of the Mississippi above the Ohio, and he expresses the usual Northerner's patronizing view of the backwards south.This is a good 150-page book that is regretfully 379 pages long. It needs some better editing. No index.